No, it’s not. This is a dangerous perspective, usually held by engineers who think that accounting doesn’t matter and don’t understand it.

You MUST accrue the lifetime value of the assets against the capital expense (R&D in this case) to determine the answer to this question.

The company (until this announcement) had raised $17B and has a $14B revenue rate with 60% operating margin.

It is only negative on margin if you assume the prior 14B (e.g. Claude 4.6 plus whatever’s unreleased) will have no value in 24 months. In that case, well, they probably wasted money training.

If you think their growth rate will continue, then you must only believe the models have a useful 9 months or so life before they are break even.

Anthropic is, according to Dario, profitable on every model <<—- they have trained if you consider them individually. You would do best to think “will this pattern continue?”

What is the lifetime value of an individual pretraining run, and what is the cost to do it? Whether it is a net positive seems to still be an open question.

Sorry - if a model costs (say) 20B to train, lasts 12 months before it becomes obsolete, generates 2B/month revenue, but with 1B/month inference costs, then it has lost 8B.

Or are you suggesting that in fact each model comes out ahead over its lifespan, and all this extra cash is needed because the next model is so much more costly to train that it is sucking up all the profits from the current, but this is ok because revenue is expected to also scale?